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PsxMeUP writes "Love is a persistent online first-person shooter that will let players build structures, permanently manipulate the environment and share resources — all in real-time. Action will be similar to a real-time strategy game as seen through the eyes of a grunt. The game is being completely designed by a man named Eskil Steenberg, and GameObserver had a chance to interview him. Steenberg talks about how all MMOs offer an egocentric experience where character growth is the most important aspect, and how he intends to change that. He also explains how mainstream MMOs have too many players, which basically trivializes accomplishments that have an impact on the entire server. 'If you imagine Civilization where you invent your stuff or build new stuff, imagine playing one of those characters on the ground doing that. And being able to do something minute in your world and see that impact in the major world,' Eskil explains, when asked what his game will be like. 'I want to scare people in a direction that is different from this sort of "me-centric" style of games. It feels that pretty much all games are going into that Diablo direction of collecting and building up my characters, and it's all very egocentric about creating your own powerful character,' he clarifies when asked how his game will be different from other MMOs. Love is well into development, and Steenberg has already posted some incredible gameplay demos. Levels, for instance, are all procedurally generated. The game also offers open-source tools, like UV editing — not a small feat considering the whole thing was designed by one man."

Sounds like the first Communist MMO! But more power to him, I just don't see how one guy is going to put out a game changer, these games tend to be "mecentric" for a reason. People want to see that last boss, kill that god, but not everyone is willing to put in 40 hours a week.

So it was communist when Blizzard made everyone turn in cloth to try and open the doors of Az-Nerub? (or whatever the hell it was, I wasn't playing then.)

His design would still work as long as the person who contributes the most gets the most. Think of it like the construction workers who work on the road. The guys who put in overtime get paid more, the people who don't help at all (me and you) don't get paid at all, but we all get to use the road when it's finished.

The opening of the doors at Ahn'Qiraj was a real-time event (rather than just appearing after a patch). I figure that they did the collecting thing to space out the openings so they could deal with the inevitable realm server crashes one at a time rather than all at once.

I think he's re-envisioning the reward system and the meaning of "success" in his game. In a game like WoW, you're l33t if you managed to accumulate the most epic loot for yourself. Success in WoW is making your toon uber-powerful, or doing something that nobody else can.

In Love, it sounds like success is much more based around your personal relationships with other players - success is measured in how much respect and "props" you get from your fellow players. Players are competing not for shiny loot which they can hoard, but for the opportunity to help their peers and earn a good reputation.

Kind of reminds me of the warez scene, actually. Everyone is hyper-motivated and competitive about doing a good job, even though ultimately all they're doing is sharing with each other. It's competition to show who's the best at sharing.

Not a fan of "toon", either, but avatar is just as bad if you think about it. Worse, even. An avatar is a physical manifestation of a god. Most "avatars" running around in WoW are, how shall we put this, children of a very lesser god.

Commander Data: Captain, it appears the gods of these avatars have IQs of approximately 90. See as this one runs up to a green pig and kills it, and the other avatar says, "Good job".

I never heard the term until people started talking about their MMORPG characters. I was mucking a hell of a lot around 1994-1998 and nobody ever referred to their character as a "toon". It was always "my character" or "one of my alts" when referring to an alternate character. A character might have been a "toon" if they were intended to be a cartoon character who you might see in an American animated short or feature, but the general class of player characters was never called a "toon".

I don't know how many times I have to explain it, but your character on World of Warcraft is not a cartoon.
It's a character.

*sigh* And what's one of the definitions of "cartoon"? "3 : animated cartoon"[1] [merriam-webster.com]: "A motion picture that is made from a series of drawings, computer graphics, or photographs of inanimate objects (as puppets) and that simulates movement by slight progressive changes in each frame." [2] [merriam-webster.com]

Video games are a type of animation. A character or avatar in a video game can very much be called a "toon" by it's very definition. Just because you can't get over your association of "toon" with "Looney Toons" doesn't make

So... you're saying that the word 'toon' now means something different, rather than what it's traditionally meant, and that we should use your version? Aight.

The 2007 CG remake of Beowulf is certainly not a cartoon. The Merriam-Webster definition is so generic as to be useless; "photographs of inanimate objects (as puppets) and that simulates movement by slight progressive changes in each frame" includes any frame-based animation of ANY sort.

I don't know how many times I have to explain it, but your character on World of Warcraft is not a cartoon.

Yeah, 'toon' always annoyed me too. It's part of the constant belittling of everything that many players engage in to hide their lack of self-esteem. Same with the 'X takes no skill', 'everythings easy' etc. It's the same mentality that makes the fat kid pay himself out for being fat. If he gets in first then somehow it hurts just a little less. It's also a snide way to insult - if you're bad and have no skill and yet you managed to beat someone else, they must be REALLY bad. It's sad to spend 60 hours a we

> People want to see that last boss, kill that god, but not everyone is willing to put in 40 hours a week.

Procedural content wouldn't change that much. In fact, it would allow you to kill your personal final boss, not the same one everyone else has slain, and make you wait with twenty other people which are currently also waiting for it to respawn.

> these games tend to be "mecentric" for a reason.

Yes, but a different reason you cite. It is terribly hard to automatically generate content, which is actu

Sounds like the first Communist MMO! But more power to him, I just don't see how one guy is going to put out a game changer, these games tend to be "mecentric" for a reason. People want to see that last boss, kill that god, but not everyone is willing to put in 40 hours a week.

It depends on what you mean by "game changer". At it's most successful, it's not going to reinvent the standard MMOG, but it could very well find its own audience who wouldn't be interested in WoW, or play WoW not for the "mecentric" elements as much as the crafting or other social aspects of the game. Those players won't find such aspects to be very strong in WoW, but they might find them in Love. A Tale in the Desert is an example that has found a strong audience for itself without taking the online ga

I have no idea why my son is so excited about this particular game, but every month or so he keeps asking if it's out yet. We saw some of the demos and evidently it stuck with him. I think he likes the idea of being able to change the world.

Maybe he is just in love with the look of the thing. I just watched the in-game video [stacken.kth.se], and it's both weird looking and yet oddly attractive. A bit like playing in a Van Gogh.
The whole "build your own base/city" part sounded quite good to me too though

The best part of the video though is "oh! The sun is coming out! How nice";)

Incidentally I argued yesterday with him (D.Smart) on the board for one of his two new games, and I must say he really lives up to his reputation : he is quite in love with himself and unable to accept the least criticism and remarks about bugs in his games. ("Don't make a judgment about my game by trying out the demo" was worth a good laugh though)

From what I've read, Steenberg does seem to have more skills and less attitude

>>Production was always moving along and there were videos and screenshots of the game, but for the longest time there was simply no game for anyone except Mr. Smart to play.

Why on earth do you think that people need programming teams to make things happen? A lot of solo programmers go the way of Derek Smart, much like how so many wannabe authors who are "working on their book" never get around to actually writing it/finishing it/polishing it.

Derek Smart was screwed on BC3k by his publisher who dumped it out the door unfinished and broken. He filed a lawsuit against them for the rights to it and settled out of court. Smart is still in business making his own games more than 10 years later.

You don't have to like D.S. or his games, but serious gamers, indies, and solo devs have lots of respect for him.

This guy is the upper league. I met him a few times at the Blender conference. He's on the OpenGL Standards Team and has forgotten more about coding than most of us will ever learn. Just watching him demonstrate his 3D tools is jawdropping. Listening to him when he talks about 3D and real-time multi-user networking is a feast. He's in the upper league of coding *and* in the upper league of taste and design. If anybody can pull something like this through it's him. Go and watch the demos if you don't believe me.

I concur. I've been a professional game designer for just over 5 years, and when I first saw Eskil's videos, I simply couldn't believe that Love was the work of a single person. The amount of skill and talent required to produce a game of that magnitude is staggering. To see it concentrated in one person is unheard of.

I was so amazed that I spent over an hour researching him, thinking that I would unearth some kind of collective behind him. Instead I just kept finding more proof of his genius. He's the

This kind of collaborative building effort was done in ATITD. (A Tale in the Desert.) It was really great, but an interesting thing happened...

Guild houses and other structures require LOTS of raw materials. Gathering these were very labor intensive. The 'less dominant' personalities were relegated to these tasks while the Type-A guys did fun things like detail-work and planning. There were players who literally logged in and spent hours making bricks or gathering straw. They'd hand these off the the guild leaders when they were done and start over.

The only reason this wasn't slave labor is that there was no coercion, it was just a class system based on your personality, your 'need to be accepted' and your willingness to do the grunt-work. The social dynamic of the whole thing was one of the most interesting parts of that game.

I also played ATITD for a while. It's a shame that the pace and timeline of the game was so closely driven by Teppy as opposed to by the players. The Second Telling was more or less killed off by a combination of Teppy releasing Tests at too slow a pace and, of course, the release of WoW.

Up until then though, the large community efforts were impressive. Hundreds of people involved in digs (with some people making shovels for everyone, people cooking stamina food). The nearly region-long Acro lines, etc.

I think the problem with ATITD is that there isn't any real competition. The only economy is based on helping "everyone else" achieve "some far-off goal", which, to the average player, is a crock of shit.

There's no incentive to profit from the inequal distribution of resources on the map; it's all very hold hands and love everyone. Which is great, but there isn't any room for conflict there.

"He also explains how mainstream MMOs have too many players, which basically trivializes accomplishments that have an impact on the entire server."

Is World of Warcraft. Every battleground, arena, or PvE instance is now a waiting line for your raid to get on the ride and come out looking like someone went crazy with a rubber stamp for progression. I swear standing around Org/Ironforge/Shat/Dal is like the scene of a bad photocopier accident some days.

The MM in MMO stands for Massively Multi-player! If the servers are limited to 200 registered players averaging 50-70 online most of the time (as stated in TFA), I wouldn't call it an MMO. I've played on wolf-et servers with more than 70 players.

Methinks the term is over/mis-used. If it is massively multiplayer, it MUST be online. There are no LAN games that are massive. If it is massively multiplayer... it must be multiplayer. The second M and the O are not needed.

If i say its an MFPS or MRPG, it should be understood that we're talking about a game that uses the internet to connect many players into a shared space.

Diablo *can* be played online, and *can* be played multiplayer. But it wasn't built around that. It's not massively multiplayer s

I sincerely hope he finds a way to become profitable and to find a way to keep the game play experience he wants players to have and still host more players... I doubt he can be profitable on just 200 registered players. If he can turn this into something he can make a living off of it will give me a lot of hope for aspiring developers out there. Lately it seems only people with millions in VC to burn get anywhere.

Just because no one is going to lose tens of millions of dollars in venture capital if Love fails doesn't automatically make it low-risk. Love is high risk for the developer, Eskil, who is spending several years of his life with no income to write a game that may or may not be successful. It is high-risk in the sense that it employs some unique game mechanics that haven't been copied from other large, successful games.

Well, those are all good points. Of course, from this perspective it isn't "low-budget" from the developer's view, as even though development is cheap compared to other games it represents a significant portion of his resources, making it relatively "high-budget." I think my original point that "high-risk, low-budget" is an oxymoron still stands, at least as a generalization.

Well, I guess by "profitable" I think I meant "pays enough to quit his day job" which is my own personal bar for my own "extra curricular activities" and I personally wouldn't work full time for that little.

He dropped by the week of GDC to give an extended demo of this 200-player, persistent, and uniquely beautiful game world in which players have complete control--even over the very landscape. Created with tools of his own making, including a 3D modeler and renderer, Love is an incredible example of just how far a solo project can go.

In City of Heroes, we can now stack up (i.e. overlap) base decorations to create new objects.

People use desks and chests to create entire multifloor buildings, using them as "bricks", complete with hallways and multiple interior rooms and stairways.

In other words, supergroup bases are no longer just a "The Sims" variant, with you putting down pre-designed decorations (functional or otherwise). You can now create whole worlds, buildings, mountains even.

No evidence of any sound yet, I really hope he uses similar principles for generating audio as the game seems to for other content. I'm really looking forward to games taking up a more dynamic approach to audio, synthesis could be so much more fluid and immersive than samples. And this looks like the perfect opportunity for showing people it could work especially as visually its quite stylised, so people might not expect such a 'realistic' sound world.

I like the concept and the look of the game. I'd love to try it. But I'm very afraid of getting trapped into the Noctis V [anywherebb.com] waiting game with Love. Noctis IV is a great open ended space simulation "game" where you simply explore stars, planets and moons in a galaxy. it was released over 10 years ago and people are still charting and naming celestial bodies today. it run in DOS and fits on a floppy. and it was all done by one brilliant person: Alessandro Ghignola.

'If you imagine Civilization where you invent your stuff or build new stuff, imagine playing one of those characters on the ground doing that. And being able to do something minute in your world and see that impact in the major world,' Eskil explains, when asked what his game will be like. 'I want to scare people in a direction that is different from this sort of "me-centric" style of games. It feels that pretty much all games are going into that Diablo direction of collecting and building up my characters

Don't know if any remember Allegiance [microsoft.com]. It was a space 3d combat game with resources and objectives and building units and the like, but one player was designated the commander, and he viewed the entire battle from a tactical perspective, ordering units to go do objectives much like in an RTS.... the players would get the orders he gave them as objective way points and the like, but it was up to them to actually pursue them (or not). And the commander could assign better resources (ships, missiles, etc)

Reading the article i get the impression that this would be something new, the ability of making everything yourself from scratch. Note that this is my impression. Well it's not very new.

As stated by Marc_Hawke (130338) there's also A Tale in the Desert, haven't tried that myself though. But i've tried Wurm online which is a java based MMORPG where you can make everything yourself from scratch and manipulate the enviroment as you go. This for me got very tireing after some time chopping down trees and f

You can resign yourself to nothing you do being original, because there's nothing new under the sun. Once you do that (and it's a painful realisation) you can start working on seeing that even so, you can still do things that are *good*.